Space weather can create spectacular auroras. But it can also disrupt and disable satellites that provide services like GPS. It can affect electrical grids, or even threaten astronauts onboard the International Space Station with dangerous levels of radiation…

For most of us, paying attention to space weather is about preparation. Just as you’d want advance warning of when your power or internet might go out because of a hurricane, you’d probably want to know when a solar storm might have the same effect. The people of Quebec didn’t get that warning in 1989, when a geomagnetic storm caused a 12-hour citywide blackout. Neither did the residents of Malm, Sweden, in 2003…

…Knowing the space forecast is especially important if you live near the poles, or in a country like Brazil, which faces frequent disturbances to GPS because of the plasma bubbles that form along the equator, and atmospheric fluctuations that affect radio signals.

For years, [Jian Liu] tried to forget the bloodshed he had seen and locked away his memories in the 60 rolls of film — about 2,000 photos — he had shot using an analog camera.

By releasing his images publicly, Mr. Liu joins a small group of Chinese historians, writers, photographers and artists who have tried to chronicle the chapters in Chinese history that the party wants erased from public memory.

“Reflection is only possible in a democratic and peaceful place,” he said. “Under autocratic rule, it is impossible for you to discuss this.”

IF YOU HAD a choice between a better, faster cell phone signal and an accurate weather forecast, which would you pick? That’s the question facing federal officials as they decide whether to auction off more of the wireless spectrum or heed meteorologists who say that such a move could throw US weather forecasting into chaos.

On Capitol Hill Thursday, NOAA’s acting chief, Neil Jacobs, said that interference from 5G wireless phones could reduce the accuracy of forecasts by 30 percent. That’s equivalent, he said, to the quality of weather predictions four decades ago. “If you look back in time to see when our forecast scale was roughly 30 percent less than today, it was 1980,” Jacobs told the House Subcommittee on the Environment.

That reduction would give coastal residents two or three fewer days to prepare for a hurricane, and it could lead to incorrect predictions of the storms’ final path to land, Jacobs said.

Letter writing was popular among the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Thousands of cuneiform letter tablets have been found, including many encased in privacy ensuring envelopes…

…But in ancient Greece, although writing was used extensively for record-keeping and inscriptions, personal letters were relatively uncommon. For the Greeks, the privacy that letters conferred rendered them suspicious. Why seek secrecy unless one is plotting or lying?

A German-based startup unveiled a prototype electric jet it hopes will become the air taxi of the near future. The all electric aircraft is said to have a top speed of 300km per hour (186mph) and a 300km range.

The fixed-wing plane has 36 jet engines that lets it take off and land vertically. As in, no runway needed. A brief video posted by the company shows the prototype aircraft hovering briefly but does not show it transition to horizontal flight.

Still, the company is shooting for 2025 to launch itself as an accessible and affordable air taxi service in cities around the world. Think, airborne ride hailing service that lets you take a five seater in Manhattan for a quick 10 minute trip to the airport… or out to the Long Island beaches.

How that fares with the European Aviation Safety Agency or the US Federal Aviation Administration is to be seen.

The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine them. As they work, humans breathe in airborne particles, which deposit in their lungs. The materials are shipped from places like Vietnam, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, and India, to factories in China. A literal city of workers creates four tiny computing chips and assembles them into a logic board. Sensors, microphones, grilles, and an antenna are glued together and packaged into a white, strange-looking plastic exoskeleton.

These are AirPods. They’re a collection of atoms born at the dawn of the universe, churned beneath the surface of the earth, and condensed in an anthropogenic parallel to the Big Crunch—a proposed version of the death of the universe where all matter shrinks and condenses together. Workers are paid unlivable wages in more than a dozen countries to make this product possible. Then it’s sold by Apple, the world’s first trillion-dollar company, for $159 USD.

For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they’re glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever.

When José Capriles arrived in 2008 at the Cueva del Chileno rock shelter, nestled on the western slopes of Bolivia’s Andes, he didn’t know what he would find within.

Now, more than a decade later, Capriles—an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College—and colleagues have discovered that the 1000-year-old bag contains the most varied combination of psychoactive compounds found at a South American site, including cocaine and the primary ingredients in a hallucinogenic tea called ayahuasca. The contents suggest the users were well versed in the psychoactive properties of the substances, and also that they sourced their goods from well-established trade routes.

As the birthrate plummets in South Korea, rural schools are emptying. To fill its classrooms, one school opened its doors to women who have for decades dreamed of learning to read.

Park Jong-sim, 75, is a champion octopus catcher in her village. But on a recent day, she was more worried about falling behind in her elementary-school class.

She blinked her eyes as she tried to keep them focused on the notebook, and occasionally took her reading glasses off to wipe tears caused by eye fatigue. Enunciating words was also difficult. To practice her penmanship, she woke up before dawn.

“My memory, hand and tongue don’t work like I wish,” Ms. Park said. “But I am going to learn to write before I die. You don’t know how I feel when I go to a government office, they ask me to fill out a form and the only thing I know how to write is my name.”

“But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured?” Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd asks, somewhat rhetorically, during a recent talk at a Digital Public Library of America conference.

She talks, of course, about misinformation and gaslighting campaigns that course through digital networks.

Propaganda and misinformation campaigns aren’t new, as boyd points out. Instead, it’s the playing field. The promise and hope of online connectivity and communication has given way to the sinister. “Slowly, and systematically,” boyd says, “a virus has spread, using technology to systematically tear at the social fabric of public life.”

At work are content campaigns and digital networks exploiting “data voids”, or information ecosystems ripe for manipulation, in order to sow distrust what we think we know, be it science, history, politics or the latest mass shooting near our collective next door. At root is agnotology, or culturally induced ignorance and confusion.

One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material. And then to make sure that what scientific information is available, is undermined. One tactic is to exploit “data voids.” These are areas within a search ecosystem where there’s no relevant data; those who want to manipulate media purposefully exploit these. Breaking news is one example of this. Another is to co-opt a term that was left behind, like social justice. But let me offer you another. Some terms are strategically created to achieve epistemological fragmentation. In the 1990s, Frank Luntz was the king of doing this with terms like partial-birth abortion, climate change, and death tax. Every week, he coordinated congressional staffers and told them to focus on the term of the week and push it through the news media. All to create a drumbeat.

Today’s drumbeat happens online. The goal is no longer just to go straight to the news media. It’s to first create a world of content and then to push the term through to the news media at the right time so that people search for that term and receive specific content.

The goal as we know is to manufacture confusion at scale. Read on for more on how it’s done.

A mom hacks Google Glass to help her autistic son understand facial expressions. Along the way, she wonders how neurotechnologies will influence how we augment ourselves, what traits we’ll consider inherently human, and what might be lost as we rid ourselves of them.

Samsung’s AI lab releases video showing how it can manipulate a single image to emulate someone talking. An AI startup creates a near perfect reproduction of a popular podcaster’s voice. It’s only just the beginning.

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